How do you know what you see and experiance is real?

If you’re seeing it, feeling it and/or experiencing it, wouldn’t you say it’s real to you? I would and firmly believe in responding to the reality I find myself in.
Others may see/feel/experience the same thing differently and therefore perceive a different reality, that is one of the wonders of life and the world as we know it :)

You don’t. However, life is much more pleasant if you assume it is.

Then, of course, there’s the issue of qualia, what wildflower described. Even though what you experience may seem real to you, you can’t expect others to expect it in exactly the same way (if there even are others, but that’s a whole other discussion).

You don’t. Anything and everything you do could be a dream. Maybe your whole life is a dream, and you’re really a totally different person. It could happen you know, living years and years in a dream, a 12 hour period. It wouldn’t usually, but you and every single one of us could be dreaming right now.

Assumption and trust is more fun than paranoia.

I once saw a movie that played with this idea. I do not remember the name, but it starred Lloyd Brdiges. Bridges’s character has these awful dreams about people coming after him. At the end, it turned out that what he thought was a dreamworld was reality and what he thought was reality were just dreams.

@Lost: That sounds like such a cool movie, I want to see it. Too bad you don’t remember the name :(

You don’t. I think that is why I have always been fascinated by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

@Vincentt: if I could give u more lurve I would. You’ve just given me a term, qualia, for a perceptual theory I’ve often wondered about. Thanks!

mangeons, I searched imdb.com under Lloyd Bridges movies. It is a made for TV movies called Deadly Dream http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066972/

Everything is real.
Life is real life.
Dreams are real dreams.
Thoughts are real thoughts.
Perception is real perception.

You can’t. The only thing you can know for certain is that if you have a sense of self, then you are real. I, personally, don’t believe any of you exist.

Well, Chuck, I don’t believe YOU exist.

lol, I don’t even know if I exist.

All we can ever know is our own raw experience. Our conventional model for making sense of that experience assumes that there is an objective reality that exists independently of our experience of it. That external reality possesses certain attributes whether or not there is any one observing those attributes. Even if all sentient beings were to disappear from the universe, we assume that most of the universe would chug along without missing a beat, because the way things are doesn’t depend on whether or not someone experiences them. It’s this objective “way things are” that we call reality.

We accept this model because of our human need for a way to rationally organize our experience. To pass muster with the intellect, our interpretations of our raw experience must meet certain criteria; otherwise we classify that interpretation as illusion, not having an existence outside of our mind. For example, my dream experience seems every bit as compelling as my waking experience, but it doesn’t satisfy the rule-checker of the intellect once I’m awake: the experiences aren’t consistently reproducible, can’t be corroborated by others, etc. While I’m dreaming, though, none of that matters, because the rule-checking function of my intellect is off-duty. It’s only to my waking mind that these rules are important. We could say, then, that it’s this rule-checking function of the mind that defines reality. Turn it off or alter it, and “reality” no longer has any meaning.

We assume that since reality must exist independently of observers, then a good test of reality would be agreement by many observers concerning “the way things are”. But how can we know that those other observers are themselves objective realities? In my dreams, I’m sure that the other personages populating the dreamscape would willingly confirm my experiences. In my waking hours, I can see that those others are only projections of my sleeping mind, so their opinions don’t count for much. In my waking consciousness I can compare my experience to that of others too, but I have no way of being certain that they aren’t also projections of my waking mind, do I?

In the end, there is just experience. The notion of reality only comes into play when we examine our interpretation of that experience. We have faith in the set of rules by which we order that experience into a rational picture of how things are. But do these rules represent actual properties of an independently existing, objective reality, or does what we call reality owe its existence to the application of the mind’s rules?

To me, the only reality worthy of the name has to lie in the realm of raw experience itself, before even the slightest degree of interpretation. This would mean that reality would be neither objective nor subjective in nature, since “subject” and “object” are already the beginnings of interpretation.

Vincentt: Lurve for putting a name to it!
Yes! Exactly! Is my experience of red the same as your experience of red?

take a drug test?

I think the issue of reality is much more problematic for someone who sees non-real things that look real. Normally, we trust our senses to give us an accurate reflection of the data that surrounds us. For all working purposes, that is reality.

We talk about what we think reality is with other people, and if we get concurrence, we feel a sense of confirmation that our senses are reporting reliably to us. This sense of confirmation is, of necessity, based on shaky ground, due to some objections mentioned above. Still, it’s the best we’re going to get.

Here’s a question: what do you use reality for? Why do you need reality?

Now in some people’s reality, they will say, “that’s not a question; that’s two questions!” Be that as it may. Most people will take my point, despite their pickiness about terminology. Or so I believe.

My answer to that question is people use reality to develop a consensus on which they can build a communications infrastructure. In order to communicate, we have to agree on how we are going to use symbols. We’ll call this object—and others that are similar to it in these dimentions—a table. We use this configuration of lines to indicate we are discussing a table, and we use that set of sounds to indicate the same thing. We also use these hand postures.

Reality is a communications process. It is dependent on language, written, signed, and aural. There is no particular reason to use one symbol over another to indicate concept. So we have multiple languages, multiple alphabets, and probably multiple sign languages (certainly multiple dance styles).

Does the form of the symbol a group of people uses for a component of their reality-concept change the reality of those people in a strong enough way that other people not familiar with that symbolic system would not recognize the component as real? We all know the famous example that the Eskimos have umpteen words for snow. English speakers may have three or four, but we don’t really recognize all those other forms. They don’t exist because we don’t have words for them!

So now, when I answer the question, I have to say that one way I know something is real is because I have a word for it. It is through exchanging words that I attain a mechanism to corroborate my sense of “reality.”

So if I say I see something, and someone else says they see it, too, we generate more confidence that we are seeing the same thing. Never mind that our words may be inadequate for the thing, or that we may not have words for an important aspect of that reality-mote.

So what is unreal? If I cannot verify my senses with other people’s, then my senses could be deemed as “faulty.” If I do not have a symbol to name something, it is also unreal. That latter unreality is the sort that could be converted to reality, if we develop a consensus symbol for what it is, and learn to see it.

Bottom line: no one knows if anything is real unless it is corroborated by other people using an imperfect symbol system that has been devised to attempt to identify reality.

@daloon
I’ve never quite bought into the “you can’t think it unless you have a concept (or word) for it” theory. For example, I suspect that my Chicago winter experience has exposed me to all of the 16 varieties of snow in the Eskimo lexicon at some time or other, and I can summon up from my memory the qualities of many different substances that all would fall under the umbrella concept of snow. I don’t have names for them, but they’re no less real to me for that, because I have my experience of them to draw on. I can describe my experience in such a way that if you have also had that experience, you’ll know what I’m talking about. For instance, if I refer to the snow that falls when it’s very cold and that squeeks under your boot, someone else from Chicago would know the stuff I’m talking about. They’d probably also know that you can’t make a snowball out of that stuff, even though our concept of “snowball” would suggest that you could. That’s an example of thinking about something for which one has no word.

Yes Harp, I, too, am troubled by that idea. I was thinking about the question that is often asked of people who speak more than one language: are there things you can’t think in one or the other? Apparently there are. There are untranslateable things.

Perhaps I lead us in a misleading direction when using the snow example. Probably these things that are language dependent are more abstract in nature.

I think you raised another interesting point when you said, “I can describe my experience in such a way that if you have also had that experience, you’ll know what I’m talking about.”

As you know, I recently was initiated into the land of depression. I learned things I had no idea existed while there. I was constantly saying, “Now I get it.” My wife, who has not visited this land (and may it stay that way) doesn’t get it, and therefore she has difficulty predicting my behavior. I come here, meet a few other folks who suffer from depression, and they all know exactly what I’m talking about.

Our questioner, who is schizophrenic, has some real, practical problems that may have given rise to this question. I’ve been trying really hard to imagine what it might be like to have hallucinations, but all that happens is I get scared, and I start feeling anxious, and I worry that I might make myself depressed.

Anyway, I tried to address this question more as a practical problem than a philosophical one. That thought process was an interesting trip. I think I shied away from it though. For now, I’m thinking about what it might be like to see and hear characters that no one else sees.

One could take the position that no one else sees or hears these characters, so they are not real. Alternatively, one could believe it doesn’t matter that they can’t see them, I have a privileged view of the world, and I see things that others can’t, so they are real.

Words aren’t necessarily the problem here, but experience is. And your thought that reality lies in raw experience is troublesome in this context, because it says that I can know reality on my own, without words. I’m saying that verification from others is crucial, and that you have to be suspicious of your own senses. Otherwise, you might well be fooled by them. Reality is social, not individual.

Isn’t it interesting that only within the last few generations of humankind has it become generally accepted that for something to be real it has to be perceivable by anyone? That’s quite a leap in the evolution of the rules by which we test reality. Now we judge that if I see something in the corner, but you don’t, then it can’t be real. A couple of centuries ago, that wouldn’t necessarily have been assumed. I would tend to subscribe to that new version of the rules, but I recognize that there’s a certain amount of faith involved in our commitment to those rules. We’re betting that Occam’s razor holds true.

reality is in the eyes of the beholder

Aren’t you supposed to just pinch yourself?

Reality is a mutually agreed-upon mass hallucination.

Perhaps not entirely related, but funny nonetheless: http://www.qwantz.com/comics/comic2-1446.png